Museum of Salt History in Zigong

2014-09-05
sonrisabai
Tours
Zigong
769

Can you imagine food without salt? What a great flavor we would miss out. Salty and spicy are my two favorite flavors for always. Besides it’s great effect on taste bud, our body need salt too. It is a necessary substance for the well-being as well. To keep a well-functioned body, people have to get a certain amount of salt intake everyday.

There is salt as well in the air we breathe. Our ancestors used to lap the salty oil to get salt, as the salt-making skills progressing, taking salt was becoming much easier.Generally speaking, there are three kinds salt in Chinese daily intake, well and rock salt, sea salt and lake salt.

The history of Salt Museum is situated in the Zigong city, Sichuan Province. Frst built in the Qing dynasty, around AD 1736. In the early period of Qing dynasty, a business man from another province tried to start a salt business in Zigong city. Through unremitting work of several years, his business became a giant success. In order to celebrate the business and show up his wealth, he started to build the museum.

It was designed carefully by renowned artists, great works can be seen almost everywhere such as wood carving, stone inscriptions, painting, clay statues. The museum stores tons of historical records, ancient literature and salt making tools, the items reach up to 1332 pieces. Here you can get the most comprehensive knowledge of the salt history in China.

There are five major parts of the museum exhibition, which are the prologue, overview of Chinese Salt period, man-made excavation salt well period, percussion drilling period, rotary drill period and the development of salt. Tourists can see the Ten Greatest Salt Inventions in Chinese history, from difference ages. In the middle of the exhibition hall, a bronze statue of a salt-well digging work is holding a shovel, reappearing the image of him lifting the salt out from the well in the old days.

The highlight of the museum is they have this beautiful yard called Herbs Garden, in which there grows more than 300 kinds natural herbs. It is unbelievable to see how much those plants can benefit for the body. I guess that is another nature wonder. All we need to do is explore them more and make the best of it. Besides all the traditional Chinese medical knowledge you could get from statues and images, you could really learn how to become to doctor here. Some easy tips during the inspection for example.

Among which, my personal favorite for all those lessons is pulse-taking. It is hard to imagine how much information you can get simply from pulsing, for instance, they can tell if you have truly inner health, not from the outside. What kind potential disease you might have in the coming years. After that, the doctor might give you some advise about enhancing life quality and how to keep the body in a good condition.